The Wideness of the Sea

by Katie Curtis

  “Oh Anna, you are exactly what I was hoping for,” Genevieve gushed, getting up from her desk, her gray suit impeccably tailored, her neat blond blonde bob razor sharp, when Anna interviewed with her. She hired her on the spot and she started that day. And every day after that, she showed up at 9:00 am with a vanilla chai latte for Genevieve, and a dark roast with milk and sugar for herself. The structure of her new days carved out space for Anna to breathe, let her think about something other than cancer and grad school. The gallery gave her exactly what she needed, even if her father and Andrew couldn’t understand.

  At first, Genevieve came off as a total New Yorker, tough and strident. In time, Anna learned that she was fiercely loyal, maternal, and very competitive. Once you were in her grasp, she took care of you. “You’re amazing, and I can’t live without you, you know that right?” she said whenever she left for a meeting or when they closed for the day. They fell into an easy rhythm, finishing each other’s thoughts, looking up from catalogs with possible new acquisitions with the exact same pieces circled. Anna knew a lot, thanks to her parents, though she never breathed a word about them to Genevieve. What she didn’t know she was hungry to learn.

  Anna was relieved to dive into the fast-paced art world. It was the best distraction. She didn’t paint at all that first year, just worked until six or seven at the gallery, then went home to Georgia and take out and whatever cable show they were binging on, swatting away thoughts of her mom, Andrew, her dad. She still talked to Marie and Stephen, but they were busy with med school and restaurant work. All the Goodrich children seemed to be using hard work as therapy, and she let herself be swept up into her new world.

  But then one November, they got a painting in. It was a picture of the sea, with a café in the foreground, a rope fence separating the solid ground from the rocky coast. Out on the water, there was a boat with a fisherman on it. It looked foreign, like a view of the French Riviera or the coast of Italy. It knocked on her heart until she bought a whole set of art supplies on her way home a few weeks later, and packed them in the travel easel her mother had given her.

  Since they were open on weekends, Genevieve kept the gallery closed on Mondays. Anna took the train to the Connecticut coast, to Rowayton, a commuter town just outside the city, where Georgia had taken her one weekend to visit her sister. The downtown was nestled on a harbor, with gorgeous boats and piers and a jagged coastline. The houses reminded her of Maine, with their weathered gray shingles and lobster buoys hanging from the sides.

  She started to take the train there every Monday, the commuters to the city headed to the train like worker bees to the hive. She smiled to know she was going in the opposite direction. She would head to the Rowayton Market, which reminded her of Riley’s, and get a hot coffee and a flaky chocolate croissant. Then she would set up on a pier, at a beach, or even in her car when it was raining, and sketch until her hand hurt.

  She gravitated toward the lobster boats, and the fishermen working. The wideness of the sea.

  A few years later, the gallery was having a slow summer, and Anna could see how stressed and anxious Genevieve was getting. She got burned when several new artists she had her eye on chose to sell through her biggest competitor, the Turner Gallery. When Anna read the email out loud to her announcing their show, the vein on the side of her neck pulsed as she pulled out her phone and left the owner a message.

  “Thanks a lot, Richard. The artists I’ve been wooing for the last six months just happen to have an opening with you next week. Right after I mentioned them to you. Don’t think I won’t remember, darling.” She slammed her phone down and paced the floor. Anna could still recall the moment when she let out in frustration “I need new blood!”

  Anna looked up and said, “I know some new pieces.”

  Anna took her to her apartment, where she had a dozen large oils and at least twice as many smaller oils and pastels leaning against the wall in her bedroom. She liked to wake up early and work before heading to the gallery, or sometimes she would take walks through the city to take mental snapshots of images she wanted to paint, then return home and get them down as fast as she could. Her collection—though she hardly thought of it as one—was made up of scenes from Rowayton, a few from Central Park, portraits of faces at restaurants and shops in the city. She loved to capture intimacy—a mother and child, friends, lovers, even someone alone with their passion. But her favorite pieces were of the sea.

  “Unbelievable!” said Genevieve when she saw them. She put her tortoiseshell eyeglasses on top of her head and leaned in more closely, her hazel eyes sparkling with delight. “It’s astounding how mature your work is! I had no idea you could paint like this.”

  Of course, Genevieve had no idea that Anna’s mother was Therese McAllister. Anna wanted it that way. They had had some of her paintings come through the gallery, and Anna found she couldn’t muster the energy to tell her. It felt like a truth that rested deep in her heart, and digging it out would be too painful and messy. Except for the times her eyes fell on her mother’s name on a list she was reading, or the scroll of her ‘T’ and ‘M’ stared at her from the corner of one of her paintings in the gallery, Anna felt like her mother’s death was in another universe, or had perhaps just been the worst kind of dream.

  “Can we have an opening with these? Next weekend?” she begged Anna.

  Before she even answered, Genevieve had out her phone, and was taking pictures of Anna’s paintings. “Of course,” Anna said, happy to see relief and excitement on Genevieve’s face instead of worry.

  “Wonderful! I just sent these pictures over to the printer – can you tell them I’d like 1000 copies of a glossy card. And 100 posters. Actually, let’s make it 200 and put them up around the Met. The usual format. Let me know when you get the proofs,” she said.

  And just like that, Anna was a commercial artist. Every painting sold that night, to Anna’s great surprise. The first large pieces sold for between $10,000 and $15,000. The smaller pastels sold for $3,000 to $7,500. She was in such shock, she was glad she hadn’t invited Georgia to the opening. It was just a fluke, just a favor for a friend, she kept telling herself.

  The next day, there was a buzz. Several articles ran in different newspapers, and a few well-known websites ran features on the new young artist in Mid-town. When she showed up at 9:00 am with a vanilla chai latte for Genevieve, dark brew for herself, Genevieve spun around in her chair, her long thin legs crossed under her navy pencil skirt, and put down one of the reviews she had just finished reading.

  “What’s wrong with you, darling? Why aren’t you bringing me your resignation or opening a bottle of Champagne?”

  “But I don’t want to stop coming here,” Anna had said. She stared at Genevieve with her stubborn gaze and refused to blink. “I need this. The routine of coming here helps me paint.”

  “Ok, fine, but I am hiring someone else to answer the phones. You’re working less hours and making more of those gorgeous paintings.”

  Sarah started in the Gallery the next week, a petite girl with straight black hair and perpetual red lips who had been trying to break into the art world since she graduated from Brown, and was eager to help them both. Anna was relieved. She split her hours with Sarah, keeping connected to the art world – the buyers, the egos, the markets – through the gallery. Then retreating into her own world to create new works.

  After Raphael had come into the gallery, enlisting her help to pick out art for his loft, he had sent flowers every day and called twice a day until she had dinner with him. When they became a couple, she spent a lot of her time with him, but kept up her routine of painting in the morning and on her days off from the gallery. She managed to work while he did, and soon had enough pieces for a second opening. But she couldn’t bring herself to invite him, or Georgia. She wanted it low key.

  As they got ready for the opening, she gasped when she saw the prices Genevieve had listed for her works. This time with the larger canvases going for betw
een $40,000 to $125,000.

  “Genevieve, are you sure those are priced right?” Anna had shouted into her office when she saw the prices.

  “Oh, don’t worry, dear. That’s a bargain compared to the garbage they’re getting down at The Turner Gallery.”

  They had all sold. She was shocked and surprised at the check Genevieve handed to her. She was happy for Genevieve, and for the gallery. And for the Boys and Girls club, who got new supplies for their art program from an anonymous donor. The next day, Anna showed up with a chai latte for Genevieve, a skinny mocha for Sarah, and a dark roast for herself. As she walked to work, she noticed a woman on a bench in the park who wore a scarf in the shades of a sunrise, and mentally noted what she would be working on tomorrow.

  Without her closest friends and Raphael knowing about her openings, she stayed grounded. The routine of going into work at the gallery kept her days ordinary enough to notice the smallest things, and she wanted to keep it that way. A few times, Anna worried that her dad would find out. Either through the magazine he worked for or a stray article he stumbled on. It was immature, she knew, but she wanted him to think she had still given up art. She was still hurt by his criticism of her choice to go to Orono. To follow Andrew. He had been wrong. Her years in Orono had been so happy. She had been surrounded by real life – real friendships, the woods and rivers of Maine, and the simple, pure love from Andrew. Sometimes, she wondered if she had ever been as happy as she had those years. Then she remembered the girl on the boat, and reminded herself again that Andrew didn’t need her anymore.

  She had been immersed in her painting for over an hour, her fingers and cheeks red with cold, when she heard the car door slam. She finished the last few strokes around one of the rocks before she put down her pastel and brushed her hands together, standing up. She figured it might be her dad or Aunt Catherine. She turned around and was shocked to see Andrew walking toward her. She awkwardly put her hands in her coat pockets. That feeling of shock flooded her just as it had at Shaw’s Wharf, and she felt her hands shake for some odd reason.

  “Hi there,” she called out. Her voice seemed hoarse.

  “Hi, Anna,” Andrew said quietly as he walked closer to her. He looked good, his hair messy as usual, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a dark green plaid wool flannel over it.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I stopped by. I just heard from Liz that you got the house. I guess she talked to some neighbors at the bar. I saw the truck out front and wanted to see if you needed a hand with anything.” He seemed like he struggled to get the last part out, as if he wasn’t sure if his excuse was good enough. Anna tried not to let her reaction show. She felt pulled toward him, but she tried to tell herself it was just the familiar habit of him coming back to her mind, firing old, long-unused synapses.

  “Thanks, that’s really nice of you,” she said. She racked her brain to think of anything he could help with, just to make him feel better about stopping by. “How about helping me move a couple of paintings to the back of the truck? I have to bring them back to Marie’s, and I don’t want to risk damaging them. We could carry them out together.”

  “Can do,” he said. Andrew put his hand in his pockets, and Anna was reminded of how broad his shoulders were when he turned to go up the front walk with her. She fought the urge to grab his arm.

  They walked silently into the house. The upstairs creaked as they headed toward her uncle’s room. Anna grabbed a stack of towels and blankets that she found in the closet to put around the pieces. She was conscious of the small space at the top of the hall, and having him so close.

  “You were painting outside, right? How’s it going? Your art, I mean,” Andrew said, draping a framed picture with a blanket.

  “Good, I guess. It’s strange being back here. Ideas have been coming to me, because, well, I just see a lot of stuff I want to paint,” she said. “I forgot that Maine was so beautiful. If I try to focus, I think I could get a lot done while I’m here. Before I head back,” she added.

  “To New York,” he said, carefully wrapping a blanket around a painting. “Do you like living there? I mean, besides all the people and traffic, of course.” She was surprised he was opening the door so easily. The standoffish Andrew of the other day was gone, and the funny Andrew she remembered was standing in her uncle’s hallway.

  “Yes, I guess,” she laughed. “Besides all the people and traffic. I like the gallery where I work. Everyone is really great, especially the owner.” She shook out a quilt and pointed to a few pieces down the hall. Andrew took them down and carefully wrapped them. She and Marie had cataloged all of them and were taking most of them to her house until they decided where they were going to go. If no one was living in the house, the cold and the heat could damage them.

  “Wow, did your mom do this one?” he asked, holding the one of Anna, Marie, and Stephen. “This is amazing.”

  Anna nodded, thinking of her dream and how surreal this moment was. He was so close to her she could breathe him in, and his smell was so familiar, yet it threw her off guard.

  Andrew put the painting down. “Sorry I had to shove off so quickly the other day at Shaw’s Wharf. I had to be somewhere. But I had a chance to think through some things that I wanted to say to you. Since then, I mean.”

  Anna saw how he was struggling. “It was a surprise to run into you too,” she said, smiling, trying to make him feel at ease.

  “I have thought about you a lot, you know.” He looked up and met her gaze. “I wish I had stayed in touch. It feels strange. I barely know anything about your life now.”

  Her life now. Why would he want to know about it? She thought about how to answer him. Besides painting, and working at the gallery, she could only conjure up a string of glittering New York moments. Art shows and parties and expensive stuffy dinners where the only beer they served came from a foreign bottle. Things she knew he wouldn’t care about at all. She worried her insides were too thin, too shiny for Andrew to be interested in now. And then she remembered Miranda.

  “I have a student that I help mentor. She’s becoming a great artist. She’ll be in high school next year, and I am trying to help her get into a really good art school.”

  Andrew wrapped a painting, smiling. “That sounds like something you would do. You’re like your mom. Good at teaching art.” Anna was struck by how nice it was to be around someone with memories of her mother.

  “How’s your dad?” she asked.

  “He’s not great. He has some months where he’s in bed. Other months he can walk with a cane, and even come out on the boat with me. They have some new meds that are helping to slow down the MS, but it’s still pretty much downhill. My mom’s good though. Still teaching at the elementary school in town. Doubt she’ll ever retire.”

  Anna smiled thinking of his parents. They were like family to her once, and she had made good memories with them. But almost as a protection, her mind started replaying the hard memories for her as she stood wrapping up a painting. She remembered their last conversation here at home. The one at the pier by the old fort. The one when she had tried to convince him to come with her to New York. When he finally said no, that he couldn’t leave Maine, something broke inside her. She felt that he should have picked her, picked their relationship, over his homebody tendencies. And she remembered the long bus ride she took, trying to tell him that she had made a mistake, that she knew they needed each other. But she was wrong. She remembered the exhaust and the chemical smell of her seat mingled with her grief, making her nauseaus. She walked around after that in a daze, her heart broken, her mind numb. It was only through Marie and Georgia, and her grief group, that she found a way to return to herself. After that she had been very disciplined in not thinking about him. She tucked the pain she felt about losing him in with losing her mom, being angry at her father. She wrapped up her life in Maine carefully and left it buried in her heart. The stubborn streak she inherited from her dad came in handy when it came to shutting out the p
ain.

  But now here he was, suddenly right in front of her, and her heart had a completely different story than her mind did. There was no rational closed door, only a strong gravitational pull towards this person.

  “I was wondering, do you, would you like to come out with me on the boat sometime? We could catch up on life, or something,” he asked, scratching his head on the side like he always did when he was thinking deeply.

  Anna stopped working. “I – I’ve got a boyfriend. His name is Raphael. He lives in the city.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “Oh. Right. I guessed maybe you didn’t, since you were alone the night of the funeral. I guessed wrong, huh?” he said, smiling wistfully, his cheeks turning a light shade of rose.

  “Do you?” Anna asked, her voice a few octaves from normal. “Have a girlfriend?”

  Andrew stood at the top of the stairs with a large painting in his hands and stared at it. He shook his head slowly. “No, there is no one serious,” he answered. Then he looked up at Anna. “No one who lives in Maine, that is.” Then he headed downstairs.

  Anna wrapped up another painting. She thought of what Andrew just said, trying to understand what he meant by it. She could see him out the window from her uncle’s room, setting the frame carefully in the truck. He seemed deep in thought, his eyebrows furrowed. It was surreal to Anna that she was standing here in her uncle’s house, having a conversation with him. Catching up. She heard his feet coming up the stairs.